Gmail is a free webmail service launched by Google on March 31, 2004 and is still currently in â€˜betaâ€™ testing. The launch was a huge deal, Gmail offered 1 free gigabyte of mail storage compared to Hotmailâ€™s then puny 25 megabytes. Googleâ€™s marketing gimmick where you can be invited to sign up to Gmail just made it that much more sought after. Early in the launch Gmail invites were even being sold for hundreds of dollars on Ebay, now itâ€™s a bit easier and most people have excess invites. Shape Services has just released Gmail Mobile where you can access your Gmail account on your Blackberry.

Although you can already integrate a Gmail account with your Blackberry through the Web client it still lacks some of the features that make Gmail what it is. Shape Services tries to solve this with Gmail Mobile, offering a Gmail-like interface, and includes features like mail search, starred emails, and labels.

Your main inbox screen is identical to the Gmail inbox, where rather than showing individual emails, Gmail groups emails into threads, with the number of messages in each indicated in parentheses. New emails are displayed on a white background with bold text to easily distinguish them. Even starred items are indicated with the star on the top left corner. Composing and replying to emails only takes a few wheel-clicks and you do have the option to reply all, forward, and CC or BCC.

Although most features are available there are still limitations. One being that you can view your labeled messages but you can not label messages through Gmail Mobile. Another issue is the formatting of the emails, html and images can not be displayed and there is also issues with not having any line breaks. So emails with a lot of line breaks are difficult to read. It would have been nice to see some basic html formatting like an email address or web address being clickable.

Gmail Mobile is not for everyone, people that are satisfied with just receiving and replying to their Gmail account would be suited just by integrating their account through the Web Client. But if you like the ability to search your Gmail then Gmail Mobile might be for you.